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Notre Dame philosophy professor Meghan Sullivan has received an $806,000 grant from the The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to expand her popular God and the Good Life course and adapt it into a curricular model used by faculty across the country. The three-year award will allow Sullivan to build a network of professors interested in developing or refining their own courses that teach philosophy as a way of life. It will also spur the expansion of God and the Good Life to four to five sections per year — encompassing 600 to 700 students, or one-third of the freshman class.

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When he got to Notre Dame, Corey Robinson ’17 didn’t know what to major in — because he wanted to major in everything. He met with advisers in more than 20 departments, considering everything from Arts and Letters pre-health to Irish language and literature to aquatic biology. And he still wasn’t sure. That’s when his advising dean suggested the Program of Liberal Studies.

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Deak, an associate professor in the Department of History, was awarded the 2018 Austrian State Prize in History for his book, Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War. The Karl von Vogelsang State Prize, awarded by the federal minister for science and industry, recognizes outstanding achievements in the field of the history of social science.

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Associate Professor of English Michelle Karnes studies late Medieval literature, philosophy, and religion. In this video, she discuses why she's fascinated by the presence of marvels in both natural philosophy and literature.

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Thomas Tweed, a historian committed to improving public understanding of religions, has been appointed founding director of the Rafat and Zoreen Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion. Tweed came to Notre Dame in 2013 as the Harold and Martha Welch Professor of American Studies and professor of history, roles he will retain. He is the former president of the American Academy of Religion, the largest society for scholars of religion in the world, and has also served on the international advisory board for Notre Dame’s Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem.

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Gabriel Said Reynolds — University of Notre Dame professor of Islamic studies and theology — shows in his newest publication, The Qur’an & the Bible: Text and Commentary, that the connections between the sacred texts of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism run deep.

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The Fulbright Program is the U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program, offering students grants to conduct research, study, and teach abroad.

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In 2018 the University will launch several initiatives connected to the work of this novelist, critic of Communism, and 1970 Nobel laureate for literature. The plans include the acquisition and first English translations of Solzhenitsyn works, as well as major academic conferences and postdoctoral fellowships that will connect researchers from around the world to the manuscript and print collections held by the Hesburgh Libraries — which are among the most extensive holdings in the U.S. related to the life and work of Solzhenitsyn.  

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Gabriel Said Reynolds greets his students on the final day of his Introduction to the Quran course. He is in a small classroom on Notre Dame’s campus. His students are in Orlando, Colorado, Canada, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and beyond. Such arrangements are not uncommon in the world of massive open online courses (MOOCs), but this one is different. It breaks new ground in the online learning space by bringing students participating in the MOOC around the world together with undergraduate and graduate students that Reynolds teaches in a traditional course at Notre Dame.

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The Graduate School honored four graduating doctoral students with Shaheen Awards at its commencement ceremony — including two from the College of Arts and Letters. This year’s winners boast cutting-edge research accomplishments in their fields, as well as notable publication records, national recognition, talent for teaching and mentorship, and dedication to the community.

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When Sydney DeVoe came to Notre Dame, she was convinced she would be pursuing a career in broadcast journalism. But after various, wide-ranging internships at 21st Century Fox — focused on production, editing, marketing, finance, and legal work — and a valuable experience working in London with a Member of Parliament her junior year, DeVoe is encountering a problem that many students may envy. She has too many career paths she could pursue after graduation.

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Congratulations to the Class of 2018! This video, screened at the Arts and Letters Diploma Ceremony, features several seniors reflecting on their time at Notre Dame and in the College of Arts and Letters. In it, the new graduates discuss how a liberal arts education helped them develop skills, shaped their minds, and opened up a world of possibilities for their futures.

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Over spring break, nine students in a new class in the Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy, traveled to Houston to do ambitious reporting, learn about the journalism industry, and help with a service project. Led by Richard G. Jones, a former New York Times editor and director of the program, the course exemplifies how hands-on training is preparing a new wave of journalists who can tell the stories of tomorrow.

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Jon T. Coleman is professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on the overlap of social, cultural, and environmental history in early America and the American West. In this video, he discusses his research on how human beings continually get lost in the North American interior and how that experience has changed radically over time.

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College of Arts and Letters senior Brittany Ebeling has been named the recipient of the Kroc Institute’s 2018 Yarrow Award. The award is given annually to undergraduate students who demonstrate academic excellence and commitment to service in peace studies.

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This annual award is earned by students who demonstrate exemplary research skills and utilize a breadth of library services, resources, and expertise for their research or creative projects.

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Tatiana Botero, associate teaching professor of Spanish at the University of Notre Dame, has been named 2018 Indiana teacher of the year for university-level instruction by the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP).

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The University of Notre Dame’s Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO), a research center in the Department of Economics that works to reduce domestic poverty and improve lives through evidence-based programs and policies, has received $10 million to fund two new faculty positions and grow the center’s Social Innovation Fund, which will provide seed capital to support pilot projects and fund the scaling-up of programs that have shown early evidence of promising interventions.

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Kriag Beyerlein’s study, co-authored with Notre Dame graduate student Peter Ryan, compares the 2017 Women’s March Chicago with historical examples of religiously motivated progressive social activism and is now published in Sociology of Religion.

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Now in its third year, the College of Arts and Letters' Idzik Computing and Digital Technologies Program is helping students supplement their education with technological and programming skills. The program was endowed and renamed this year in honor of its generous benefactors, Paul and Ruth Idzik. Designed to help students obtain skills needed for success in the modern digital world, the CDT minor can be extremely appealing for prospective employers who are already attracted to the communication, organization, and analytical skills honed through the liberal arts.

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Andrew Grose, who majored in Spanish and preprofessional studies, has been named valedictorian. Harisa Spahić, a biochemistry major with minors in anthropology and science, technology and values, is salutatorian.

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A fellow of the Nanovic Institute since 2015, Donahue is co-director of the Notre Dame Berlin Seminar, which brings American scholars of German literary and cultural studies together with experts and leading figures of Germany’s literary scene.

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With renowned musicians on the faculty, new opportunities to participate in student-led music groups, and a beautiful new home for the department in O’Neill Hall, it is an exciting time for piano students at Notre Dame. The program is full of extremely students who possess not only exceptional performance skills but also outstanding intellectual ability and a strong desire to pursue the balanced blend of performance and scholarship that makes the Notre Dame music major distinctive.

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Christine Swanson ’94 has written and directed multiple award-winning films. Her husband, Michael Swanson ’93, is an Emmy-winning producer and studio executive who has worked on hit Universal Television shows. The married Department of Film, Television, and Theatre alumni also make movies together through their Los Angeles-based production company, Faith Filmworks. Grounded in their Notre Dame liberal arts education and inspired by their deep Christian faith, the Swansons use their skills to tell the type of uplifting stories they feel are missing from big Hollywood studios.  

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Now a program of the Los Angeles Times Foundation, the prizes are dedicated to honoring literary luminaries, championing new voices and celebrating the highest quality of writing from authors at all stages of their careers.

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The Department of Film, Television, and Theatre is broadening the scope of its theatre program with two new faculty members — Tarryn Chun and La Donna Forsgren. Chun specializes in the modern and contemporary periods in Chinese theatre, as well as the intersection between technology and the arts. Forsgren focuses on African American theatre and performance, dramaturgy, and black feminist theories.

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Crystal Avila's senior documentary, Beneath the Trees (Debjao de los árboles), recounts her grandfather's journey from his small village in Mexico to the United States border and his time in Yuma, Ariz., where he got a job picking cotton for 35 cents a day. The film premiered in February at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, where it was one of 10 films selected for the fest's Oscar-qualifying competition. It will screen this weekend at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival, where it is nominated for best short documentary film and Avila is up for the best female filmmaker award.

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Notre Dame political scientist Sarah Zukerman Daly is one of 31 nationwide recipients of 2018 Andrew Carnegie fellowships, the Carnegie Corporation of New York announced April 25. Each Carnegie fellow will receive up to $200,000 toward the funding of significant research and writing in the social sciences and humanities — the most generous stipend of its kind. Her book supported by the Carnegie award seeks to explain a surprising feature of post-conflict environments around the world — after suffering wartime atrocities and winning peace, millions of people around the world elect to live under the rule of political actors with deep roots in the violent organizations of the past. 

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In anthropology, “snowball sampling” refers to growing the number of participants in a research study by asking subjects to refer friends and acquaintances. For senior Candice Park, it was her research experiences at Notre Dame that snowballed, as each opportunity led her to the next — culminating in her senior thesis for the Department of Anthropology.

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Robert Audi, the John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, has been elected to the 2018 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS). He is the seventh living Notre Dame philosophy faculty member to be honored and is to be inducted at an October ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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